Okay, I give up. It’s obvious that God doesn’t want me to watch the space shuttle being launched. Yesterday’s liftoff was canceled due to a fuel leak, and now NASA officials say it will be the end of November, at the earliest, before the shuttle will take off. We’ll be gone from the Space Coast long before that. We’d like to see it, but there is a lot more here in Florida that we also want to see.

Yesterday we had a very nice lunch with Peter and Connie Bradish, our hosts here at The Great Outdoors, and then we went back to their beautiful home and spent several hours visiting. Peter and Connie are really into genealogy, and have many years of experience in family history research, and I learned a lot talking with them that will help me in my own research. In fact, back at our motorhome, I logged onto a website Connie told me about, and discovered two sisters of my father, that were born and died in infancy, that I had never known about!

By the time we got done visiting with Peter and Connie, the weather had turned very cool. The day before we were running our Winnebago’s basement air conditioner, and yesterday evening we were sitting around whining about how chilly it was!

In addition to doing some genealogy research yesterday, I also worked on the seminar schedule for our upcoming Arizona Gypsy Gathering rally. Dennis Hill from the RV Driving School will be doing four seminars at the rally, including one for ladies only, called Yes, You Can Drive That RV.

If you’ve been reading my blog or the Gypsy Journal for very long, you know that I believe that both people in an RV need to know how to drive it. One person may do most of the driving, but you both need to at least know how to get the rig off the road and to a safe place, in case of an emergency. In addition to the seminar at the rally, the RV Driving School will also be offering behind the wheel driving lessons in your own RV at the rally, for a separate fee. Anybody who has taken the class will tell you that it is one of the best investments that you can make for your RV safety.

Dennis will also be presenting seminars on Testing Air Brakes, RV Driving Tips & Techniques, and Preparing To Drive To Alaska. I think if I snivel and beg hard enough, he will probably also sit in on our RVing Alaska panel discussion. Gee, I feel kind of bad about making Dennis work so hard when his pretty wife Carol is just sitting around running their vendor booth and being bored. I wonder if I can get her to teach a line dancing class?

Today is our last day in the Titusville area, and we’re going to spend it with Tim and Ann Moran. Tim has been wanting to show me a museum near their house, but hasn’t been up to it all week. If he’s feeling better, we may do that, and if not, we’ll just sit and visit. When you’re with people you love, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it’s all about just having that precious time together.

Bad Nick has been at it again, posting a new Bad Nick Blog titled Who Makes This Crap Up? Check it out and leave a comment.

Thought For The Day – There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

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Fulltime RVers always say that their plans are written in Jell-O, and that’s a good thing, because it gives us the flexibility to go with the flow. Even when the flow is taking us where we don’t want to go!

I have bad news, and good news, and more bad news to share with you. The first bad news is that we have had a change of plans and had to cut our Florida visit short. The good news is that we have received a deposit on our MCI bus conversion and soon it will have a brand new owner. The second bad news is that we have to meet him December 4^th in Elkhart, Indiana. Yes, Indiana in December! Can you say cold?

So yesterday we were out of bed at the ungodly hour of 7:30 a.m. and started preparing to leave The Great Outdoors in Titusville, Florida. I wanted to be on the road by 9 a.m., but we were low on propane, and nobody was going to be available at the resort’s propane station until 9. Okay, how long can it take to get propane? We’d be on the road by 9:15 at the latest. Yeah, right?

I unhooked our utilities while Miss Terry stowed things away inside the motorhome, plugged in our PressurePro tire monitoring system, and started to scan our tires when an alert started beeping, telling me that our right outside dual was low on air. How low, you ask? It was down to eighteen pounds pressure! That’s not a good thing!

Our Winnebago diesel motorhome has an onboard air compressor, and came with a coiled plastic air hose to fill tires and such. I had never used it, but I drug it out of one of our storage bays, only to discover that it was kinked and cracked in three or four places. Totally useless.

The Great Outdoors has its own RV service facility, Eagles Pride, which is conveniently located next door to the propane station. It was a short drive, and I knew I could get there okay with the second tire on that dual side carrying the weight. After taking on propane, which took longer than expected, I walked over to Eagles Pride and asked if they could air up the tire and take a look at it. They said no problem, pull it up in front of one of their service bays.

That’s when I discovered that I had locked the motorhome door and left the keys inside! This day was rapidly going downhill. Fortunately (for me, at least), I had left the sliding window open next to the driver’s seat. I boosted Miss Terry up, she slid the screen out of the way, and crawled inside to open the door.

Ever the optimist, I was hoping that I had burned up all my bad karma, and maybe the flat tire was because I had not screwed on the PressurePro sensor cap correctly and had accidentally allowed the air to seep  out.

No such luck, the tech at Eagles Pride found a bolt stuck in the tread of the tire. They are not set up to repair tires, so they recommended a shop in Cocoa, about twelve miles away. With the tire aired up, we drove to the shop and it took an hour or so for them to take off the tire, remove the bolt and make the repair.

Finally, we hit the road, and rolled north on Interstate 95. We pulled into the Flying J in Saint Augustine for fuel, and since it was almost 2 p.m., had a late lunch. We were back on the road by 2:30, continued north to Interstate 10, and turned west. We were so far behind schedule that I had given up any hope of putting too many miles behind us this driving day. But traffic was light and we scooted right along, making good time.

We don’t like to drive at night, but we pushed it as far as we could, and just as the last light was fading from the sky we pulled into the Flying J at Midway, Florida, just west of Tallahassee. They have several designated RV parking spaces in their parking lot, and we slid in between two other motorhomes and settled in for the night. Including our detour south to Cocoa to get the tire fixed, we had covered 330 miles, which was a good day of driving after all.

Today we’ll have an easy run of 225 miles to the Escapees Rainbow Plantation RV Park in Summerdale, Alabama. We plan to stay there until after Thanksgiving, and then we’ll have a straight shot north up Interstate 65 all the way to Indiana.

That’s assuming, of course, that there are no other last minute changes of plans or problems to get us sidetracked.

Thought For The Day – Plant yourself in good soil if you want to bloom.

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We had a surprisingly quiet night at the Georgia State Welcome Center, and were on the road by 8:30 a.m., which is probably a new record for us, but we had a lot of miles to cover.

We had a little technical issue I wanted to have looked at, so I called the Camping World in Pooler, near Savannah, and the service manager said to come right in and they’d see what they could do. It was only nine miles to Camping World, so we were there in just a few minutes. I checked in and was told there was one rig ahead of us, and it would probably be about an hour before they could get us into the shop.

Since we didn’t have an appointment, I figured that was pretty good. But an hour later, they still had not pulled that motorhome into the service bay, so I asked again about the time frame. Then I was told it would be about 1 p.m. before they could get to us. We decided that we’d deal with it when we got to Florida.

We got back on the highway and had a quick trip south to the Florida state line, even though we drove through a 20 mile long construction zone north of Brunswick. Regular readers Lucille and Larry Tillotson had e-mailed to advise us to take the I-295 bypass around Jacksonville rather than stay on the more challenging I-95 through town, and we found it to be an excellent road.

We knew that the space shuttle Atlantis was supposed to be launched at 2:28 p.m., and I told Terry we might get lucky and see it. She got her Olympus digital camera out, just in case, and sure enough, right on schedule, we saw it streaking toward outer space.

We were going down the highway at 60 miles per hour, but Terry managed to get a couple of photos through the side window of our Winnebago before it sped out of sight, leaving a thick contrail in the blue sky.

Earlier Terry and I had been talking about the space program, and I questioned whether it was worth all the money we had poured into it. She pointed out that it has brought us all kinds of things we take for granted today, such as satellite TV programming and GPS systems. Okay, that’s a good deal I guess. We spend billions of dollars, and in return we get perpetual reruns of Roseanne and The Beverly Hillbillies, more home shopping channels than I will ever have time to skip with my remote control, and an electronic backseat driver nagging me to turn left.

We left the highway in Titusville and pulled into The Great Outdoors, one of the premier RV resorts in the country. When we said we were headed to Florida, our longtime friends Pete and Connie Bradish had generously invited us to be their guests for a few days, which we very much appreciate.

This place is really impressive. They have two swimming pools, hot tubs, an eighteen hole championship golf course, fitness center, stocked fishing lake, recreation hall, as well as an on-site post office, bank, hair salon, bank, and RV service facility.

There are hundreds of full hookup 50 amp RV sites, as well as RV ports, chalets, and upscale homes, some of which sell for over $600,000. Lots here rent for over $1,100 a month during peak season, and the resort’s newsletter listed RV lots for sale by private owners for as much as $115,000. That’s a bit out of our price range, but we sure are going to enjoy experiencing the lifestyle of the rich and famous for a while! I think I just heard Robin Leach talking about champagne wishes and caviar dreams.

Thought For The Day – The heart that loves is always young.

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